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This book provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering photographs from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 along with landscape, portraiture, and famine photography, this book explores larger issues of truth, memory, and embodiment. This book scrutinizes the colonial context to understand the production of sense itself, proposing a new theory of interpreting the historical difference of aesthetic forms. In rereading colonial photographic images, it shows how the histories of colonialism became aesthetically, mimetically, and perceptually generative. It suggests that photography arrived in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that eventually extended and transformed sight for photographers and the body politic, both British and Indian.

Pictures of animals are now ubiquitous, but the ability to capture animals on film was a significant challenge in the early era of photography. This book takes us back to the time when Americans started taking pictures of the animal kingdom, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the moment when photography became a mass medium and wildlife photography an increasingly popular genre. The book investigates the way photography changed our perception of animals. It analyzes how photographers created new ideas about animals as they moved from taking pictures of taxidermic specimens in so-called natural settings to the emergence of practices such as camera hunting, which made it possible to capture images of creatures in the wild. By combining approaches in visual cultural studies and the history of photography, the book goes further to argue that photography has been essential not only to the understanding of wildlife but also to the conceptual separation of humans and animals.

In any decade the work of only a very few artists offers a template for understanding the culture and ideas of their time. Photographer Diane Arbus is one of these rare artists, and this book returns Arbus’s work to the moment in which it was produced and first viewed to reveal its broader significance for analyzing and mapping the culture of the 1960s. While providing a unique view of the social, literary, and artistic context within which Arbus worked, this book also measures the true breadth and complexity of her achievement. The book considers Arbus less in terms of her often mythologized biography—a “Sylvia Plath with a camera”—but rather looks at how her work resonates with significant photographic portraiture, art, social currents, theoretical positions, and literature of her times, from Robert Frank and Richard Avedon to Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. It shows how her incandescent photographs seem to literalize old notions of photography as trapping a layer of the subject’s soul within the frame of a picture. For Arbus, “auguries”—as in “Auguries of Innocence,” her 1963 photographic spread in Harper’s Bazaar—conveyed the idea that whoever was present in her photograph could attain legendary status.

The vividly colored, exquisitely detailed, and dramatically lit Hubble Space Telescope images now define how we visualize the cosmos. They do not look like older photographs of the stars nor are they anything like what one sees on a dark night. Yet they appear to present the universe as one might see it, previewing what space explorers and tourists could experience when manned space travel extends humanity’s reach beyond the earth’s orbit. Improved technology, a telescope orbiting high above the earth’s atmosphere and sensitive digital cameras, can seem like an adequate explanation for the brilliant hues and sharp resolution. But there is more behind the images than just advanced instruments. Through a reprisal of Romantic tropes, the Hubble images once again invoke the sublime and they encourage the viewer to experience the cosmos visually and rationally, to see the universe as simultaneously beyond humanity’s grasp and within reach of our systems of knowledge. The book approaches the Hubble images in terms of their scientific, aesthetic, and cultural significance, and through this, a complex understanding of how these images shape our notion of the cosmos emerges. This interdisciplinary approach makes it a book that will appeal to those interested in art history and visual studies, history of science and technology, and media studies. It is also likely to attract readers interested in science fiction, American studies, and landscape studies.

The Photographic Imagination historicizes the conception of photography in the early nineteenth-century in England, in particular the works and texts by William Henry Fox Talbot, as part of a historical shift in which new systems and methods of knowledge were constituted after the collapse of natural philosophy as a viable framework for the study of nature. It locates the conditions for the conceptualization of photography within the legacy of British empiricism and the introduction of time into formations of knowledge. By addressing photography not merely as a medium or a system of representation, but also as a specific epistemological figure, it challenges the prevalent association of the early photograph with the camera obscura. Instead, it points to the material, formal and conceptual differences between the photographic image and the camera obscura image by analyzing the philosophical and aesthetic premises that were associated with early photography. It thus argues that the emphasis in early accounts on the removal of the “artist’s hand” in favor of “the pencil of nature,” did not mark a shift from manual to “mechanical” and more accurate or “objective” systems of representation. In the 1830s and 1840s the photographic image, unlike the camera obscura image, was neither seen as an emblem of mechanical copying nor of visual verisimilitude. In fact, its conception was symptomatic of a crisis in the epistemological ground which informed philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries.